I had the Dark Integers story collection, but I lent it to a colleague and they haven't given it back.

Part 6 quotes a Motte'r as saying,

This distrust of experts dates back at least to Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong. Eliezer pointed out, rather convincingly, that mainstream philosophy is a total mess, and that taking a philosophy course is not a great way to improve your thinking. Most likely you’ll waste your time learning about Pythagoras or something.

The thudding lack of intellectual curiosity is giving me a headache. Why study Pythagoras? Hmm, how about learning how to talk about a semi-legendary person of whom we have no direct written evidence, only stories written centuries after the fact?

We have a couple threads of book recommendations, first here and then again here. They're very miscellaneous and may or may not cover what you're interested in.

The Bell Curve in Perspective is free online.

Our house, our rules, I suppose... but maybe TechTakes is a better fit, unless the examples you have in mind seem rooted in TREACLES particularly.

Suppose I said, "I have this clock that I really like. It's a very nice clock. So, I am going to measure everything I can in terms of the times registered on this clock."

"OK," you might say, while wondering what the big deal is.

"In fact, I am going to measure all speeds as the time it takes to travel a standard unit of distance."

"Uh, hold on."

"And this means that, contrary to what you learned in Big University, zero is not a speed! Because the right way to think of speed is the time it takes to travel 1 standard distance unit, and an object that never moves never travels."

Now, you might try to argue with me. You could try to point out all the things that my screwy definition would break. (For starters, I am throwing out everything science has learned about inertia.) You could try showing examples where scientists I have praised, like Feynman or whoever, speak of "a speed equal to zero". When all that goes nowhere and I dig in further with every reply, you might justifiably conclude that I am high on my own supply, in love with my own status as an iconoclast. Because that is my real motivation, neither equations nor expertise will sway me.

Yud argues that 0 and 1 are not probabilities in exactly this way. He says that you can't turn a probability of 0 or 1 into an odds ratio, because you'd be dividing by 0. This and everything that followed is just getting high off his own supply. One could try showing how he presumes his own conclusion. One could try showing how he breaks the basic idea that probabilities by their nature add up to 100% (given an event E, what can Yud say is the probability of the event E-or-not-E?). One could even observe that the same E. T. Jaynes he praises in that blog post uses 1 as a probability, for example in Chapter 2 of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2003). If you really want to cite someone he admires, you could note that Eliezer Yudkowsky uses 1 as a probability when trying (and failing) to explain quantum mechanics, because he writes probability amplitudes of absolute value 1.

As an academic, I have to hold myself back from developing all those themes and more.

"Rationalists should win!" Not whine, win.

(Wonka voice) Strike that, reverse it

That blog post irritates me in multiple directions every time I am reminded of it. The wrongness is so layered that any response I attempt degenerates into do you even Bloch sphere, bro before I give up and find something more worthwhile to do with my life.

That post can also be found in the archive of old!sneerclub.

Nitter links: tweet, beginning of thread. The original source appears to be Michael Lewis' new book Going Infinite.

Eh, it is what it is; computers were a mistake, etc. Thanks for the suggestion anyway (and maybe it works for other people, which is better than nothing).

Hmm. Tried that just now, and it's still broken.

Too soon!

:-P